The Guardian Ideas Interview with Gaby Hinsliff about Claire’s new book ‘Control: how we lost it and how to take it back’
From children struggling with their mental health to adults worried about AI, many of us feel neglected and ignored by politicians. How would Keir Starmer’s former director of policy fix that?
Tue 3 Nov 2026 10.00 GMT
Do you ever feel as if life is spiralling out of control? As if the world’s problems are too big, or politicians too small, to get a grip on everything from rising prices to emergent threats such as AI?
If so, says the political strategist Claire Ainsley, you’re neither alone nor irrational. “It’s probably because you’ve got a lot to do, and the world is out of control,” she says cheerfully from her home in York, where she lives with her husband, an artist, and their two teenage children. But it is the politicians’ job to master fast-moving and complex events, she adds, and if conventional parties seem increasingly powerless to do anything about them, then populist alternatives will be only too ready with dangerously easy-sounding answers.
Her new book Control: How We Lost It and How to Take It Back argues that the centre-left can tackle that fatally undermining sense of impotence by rewiring government and putting people back in charge of their own lives. “We know the rightwing populists have an agenda that is dangerous and divisive. The question is what is being done to stop it,” says Ainsley, who served as Keir Starmer’s director of policy in opposition and is now a consultant for the Washington-based thinktank Progressive Policy Institute. “It’s that lack of leadership from centre-left politicians that people are crying out for.”